I agree wholeheartedly. I think that treating software as dichotomous with "hard tech" (instead of orthogonal) is a profound mistake that really proliferates, n

I agree wholeheartedly. I think that treating software as dichotomous with "hard tech" (instead of orthogonal) is a profound mistake that really proliferates, not just through VCs, not just through the industry, but through our entire culture. So, so many (especially older) hardware guys I know don't see software as a real field, and I think this is a big part of the reason why. And much of the discussion about technical debt, about "the web toolchain sucks", or "operating systems suck", or X, Y, Z, they all suck... so often, I think that's just a different way of saying "we have this really hard problem, and we've spent decades piling really innovative partial solutions to it on top of other really innovative partial solutions, but nobody has come along with something that really, really works." And it's a tremendous problem. The response I've seen in the past is, "We love those ideas, they're just more appropriate for, say, YC research." But for hardware, the bar is automatically different: it's understood that there must be some degree of longer-term research and development that goes into a product. And I think that's completely untrue: both require experimentation, both require feedback, both require upfront work to get right. And to be honest, this misunderstanding probably stands at the core of the strongest arguments I've ever heard against the maturity of the software industry.